November 19 was World Toilet Day and the country is abuzz with Swachh Bharat slogans, but none of this will make any impact unless we get rid of old, Brahminical notions of purity and pollution
Early in September this year, the legendary Prof. Robert Chambers visited a village in Uttar Pradesh to survey the progress of the Swachh Bharat Mission. In one home, he went down on his knees and put his hand in literally to inspect the contents of the twin pit latrine there.
The idea was to allay the fears and scepticism of the villagers and show them that the human waste in the five-year-old pit had changed completely into compost, with no odour or contaminants, and was ready to use as fertiliser.
Few of us would do what Prof. Chambers did, and he in turn was merely following in the footsteps of Gandhi. But with World Toilet Day just going by on November 19 and the government now levying a Swachh Bharat cess on our incomes, it is time to think of not just superficial ways to improve cleanliness but to go deeper and jolt us out of our deeply ingrained notions of purity and pollution.
As Swachh Bharat slogans buzz around us, many scholars warn that this mission’s fate will be similar to previous experiments such as Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan and Total Sanitation Campaign if primacy is not given to changing hygiene behaviour rather than to merely meet toilet construction targets.
Last year’s SQUAT report showed clearly that most Indians continue to believe in perverse notions of ‘purity and pollution’ driven by rigid Brahminical ideas wherein polluting the external environment is taken for granted while homes are kept ‘clean’ by not building or using toilets indoors. As long as this mindset continues, the idea of a ‘clean India’ cannot materialise.
This is the reason why the issue of open defecation must be opened up, public conversations created around it, and collective action initiated. The situation is ironic because the act of defecation is kept outside the home, thus attempting to hide it, but by defecating outside people are exposing themselves in public.
The real idea of ‘purity and pollution’ must be linked to healthy living and physical and mental wellbeing. This puts diarrhoeal deaths, malnutrition and stunted growth at the forefront and makes safe sanitary conditions primary. Second, the message needs to be driven in that it is not someone else’s responsibility to clean your waste, but your own.
A recent news report told a horrifying story of a young Dalit boy being asked to clean up a schoolmate’s excreta. Manual scavenging persists, despite laws banning it. All of it is due to the age-old notion of individual purity being maintained by the labour of others. A recent paper by JNU scholar Amit Thorat and the Rice Institute’s Dean Spears talks of how our sanitation habits are deeply rooted in caste and untouchability practices.
One way to address this would be to ensure the presence and participation of Dalits and other communities, who have been exploited as society’s ‘cleaners’, in the decision making at each level. They must be a part of mandated decision-making bodies such as Village Water and Sanitation Committees, District Water and Sanitation Missions/ Committees and State Water and Sanitation Missions so that they can influence sanitation planning, implementation and monitoring.
Could the marketplace provide some answers? For this, it is worth looking at some examples of how companies have transformed consumers into responsible customers. Today, a McDonald’s customer collects the food, pays for it, consumes it and then disposes of the waste. Similarly, travellers taking flights are increasingly buying tickets, doing self check-ins and carrying their luggage on their own. While a McDonald’s may follow this method to cut costs, the logic could be institutionalised to inculcate the idea of the individual taking responsibility for the safe disposal of the waste produced by defecating in the open. But this also means that the government must ensure that the poor, who still can’t afford basic housing (whether in rural or urban areas), are not penalised for open defecation by this logic of citizen’s accountability — unless they are included within a broader umbrella where such basic services are provided for them by the government.
In fact, even people who use a flushable toilet need to be told that there is no guarantee that the waste they create is being safely disposed of at the end of the sanitation cycle. A recent Faecal Management Study conducted by WaterAid India finds that New Delhi, with the best sewage treatment capacity in the country, is at present able to treat only about 60 per cent of the total sewerage being produced, leaving 40 per cent untreated in the open environment. In essence, it would not be wrong to suggest that 40 per cent of Delhi’s population indirectly defecates in the open. The challenge is to create a narrative of responsibility and awareness around this.
While state accountability is undoubtedly a part of it, citizen accountability, especially of the well-off sections, needs to be addressed. In this context, the story of the sanitation drive in 19th century London needs to be redesigned and re-disseminated in India. It was only after the elite began to be badly impacted by cholera epidemics in London that they began to take the issue of sanitation and hygiene seriously. The narrative of a campaign, therefore, needs to weave in both the rich and the poor in a role of common responsibility and complementarity to ensure the larger health of the society. The Swachh Bharat Mission would merely provide an entry point to this.
At the policy level, the government needs to invest adequately in behavioural change. Ironically, the present government has cut down the budget ratio for this from 15 per cent to a meagre 8 per cent. But even that small amount rarely gets utilised due to a hardware-obsessed bureaucracy. Similarly, 60-70 per cent of the budget earmarked to rehabilitate manual scavengers is returned unutilised every year because it is on nobody’s priority list. And the business of cleaning up someone else’s waste continues unabated.
While all of us need not start digging into decomposed waste like Prof. Chambers did, we do need to know that our responsibility for our waste does not end once it leaves our bodies, but actually begins then. We need to ensure that it is disposed of in a safe, humane and sustainable manner. Only then can we claim full purity of our souls, homes and environs.
Avinash Kumar is Director of Programmes & Policy at WaterAid India.
